A Tale of Two Cities/ Book the Second/ Chapter XXI

CHAPTER XXI: ECHOING FOOTSTEPS

A WONDERFUL CORNER for echoes, it has been remarked, that corner
where the Doctor lived. Ever busily winding the golden thread which
bound her husband, and her father, and herself, and her old directress
and companion, in a life of quiet bliss, Lucie sat in the still
house in the tranquilly resounding corner, listening to the echoing
footsteps of years.

At first, there were times, though she was a perfectly happy young
wife, when her work would slowly fall from her hands, and her eyes
would be dimmed. For, there was something coming in the echoes,
something light, afar off, and scarcely audible yet, that stirred
her heart too much. Fluttering hopes and doubts- hopes, of a love as
yet unknown to her: doubts, of her remaining upon earth, to enjoy that
new delight-divided her breast. Among the echoes then, there would
arise the sound of footsteps at her own early grave; and thoughts of
the husband who would be left so desolate, and who would mourn for her
so much, swelled to her eyes, and broke like waves.

That time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then, among
the advancing echoes, there was the tread of her tiny feet and the
sound of her prattling words. Let greater echoes resound as they
would, the young mother at the cradle side could always hear those
coming. They came, and the shady house was sunny with a child's laugh,
and the Divine friend of children, to whom in her trouble she had
confided hers, seemed to take her child in his arms, as He took the
child of old, and made it a sacred joy to her.

Ever busily winding the golden thread that bound them all
together, weaving the service of her happy influence through the
tissue of all their lives, and making it predominate nowhere, Lucie
heard in the echoes of years none but friendly and soothing sounds.
Her husband's step was strong and prosperous among them; her
father's firm and equal. Lo, Miss Pross, in harness of string,
awakening the echoes, as an unruly charger, whip-corrected, snorting
and pawing the earth under the plane-tree in the garden!

Even when there were sounds of sorrow among the rest, they were
not harsh nor cruel. Even when golden hair, like her own, lay in a
halo on a pillow round the worn face of a little boy, and he said,
with a radiant smile, "Dear papa and mamma, I am very sorry to leave
you both, and to leave my pretty sister; but I am called, and I must
go!" those were not tears all of agony that wetted his young
mother's cheek, as the spirit departed from her embrace that had
been entrusted to it. Suffer them and forbid them not. They see my
Father's face. O Father, blessed words!

Thus, the rustling of an Angel's wings got blended with the other
echoes, and they were not wholly of earth, but had in them that breath
of Heaven. Sighs of the winds that blew over a little garden-tomb were
mingled with them also, and both were audible to Lucie, in a hushed
murmur-like the breathing of a summer sea asleep upon a sandy shore-
as the little Lucie, comically studious at the task of the morning, or
dressing a doll at her mother's footstool, chattered in the tongues of
the Two Cities that were blended in her life.

The Echoes rarely answered to the actual tread of Sydney Carton.
Some half-dozen times a year, at most, he claimed his privilege of
coming in uninvited, and would sit among them through the evening,
as he had once done often. He never came there heated with wine. And
one other thing regarding him was whispered in the echoes, which has
been whispered by all true echoes for ages and ages.

No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with a
blameless though an unchanged mind, when she was a wife and a
mother, but her children had a strange sympathy with him- an
instinctive delicacy of pity for him. What fine hidden sensibilities
are touched in such a case, no echoes tell; but it is so, and it was
so here. Carton was the first stranger to whom little Lucie held out
her chubby arms, and he kept his place with her as she grew. The
little boy had spoken of him, almost at the last. "Poor Carton! Kiss
him for me!"

Mr. Stryver shouldered his way through the law, like some great
engine forcing itself through turbid water, and dragged his useful
friend in his wake, like a boat towed astern. As the boat so
favoured is usually in a rough plight, and mostly under water, so,
Sydney had a swamped life of it. But, easy and strong custom,
unhappily so much easier and stronger in him than any stimulating
sense of desert or disgrace, made it the life he was to lead; and he
no more thought of emerging from his state of lion's jackal, than
any real jackal may be supposed to think of rising to be a lion.
Stryver was rich; had married a florid widow with property and three
boys, who had nothing particularly shining about them but the straight
hair of their dumpling heads.

These three young gentlemen, Mr. Stryver, exuding patronage of the
most offensive quality from every pore, had walked before him like
three sheep to the quiet corner in Soho, and had offered as pupils
to Lucie's husband: delicately saying "Halloa! here are three lumps of
bread-and-cheese towards your matrimonial picnic, Darnay!" The
polite rejection of the three lumps of bread-and-cheese had quite
bloated Mr. Stryver with indignation, which he afterwards turned to
account in the training of the young gentlemen, by directing them to
beware of the pride of Beggars, like that tutor-fellow. He was also in
the habit of declaiming to Mrs. Stryver, over his full-bodied wine, on
the arts Mrs. Darnay had once put in practice to "catch" him, and on
the diamond-cut-diamond arts in himself, madam, which had rendered him
"not to be caught." Some of his King's Bench familiars, who were
occasionally parties to the full-bodied wine and the lie, excused
him for the latter by saying that he had told it so often, that he
believed it himself- which is surely such an incorrigible
aggravation of an originally bad offence, as to justify any such
offender's being carried off to some suitably retired spot, and
there hanged out of the way.

These were among the echoes to which Lucie, sometimes pensive,
sometimes amused and laughing, listened in the echoing corner, until
her little daughter was six years old. How near to her heart the
echoes of her child's tread came, and those of her own dear
father's, always active and self-possessed, and those of her dear
husband's, need not be told. Nor, how the lightest echo of their
united home, directed by herself with such a wise and elegant thrift
that it was more abundant than any waste, was music to her. Nor, how
there were echoes all about her, sweet in her ears, of the many
times her father had told her that he found her more devoted to him
married (if that could be) than single, and of the many times her
husband had said to her that no cares and duties seemed to divide
her love for him or her help to him, and asked her "What is the
magic secret, my darling, of your being everything to all of us, as if
there were only one of us, yet never seeming to be hurried, or to have
too much to do?"

But, there were other echoes, from a distance, that rumbled
menacingly in the corner all through this space of time. And it was
now, about little Lucie's sixth birthday, that they began to have an
awful sound, as of a great storm in France with a dreadful sea rising.

On a night in mid-July, one thousand seven hundred and
eighty-nine, Mr. Lorry came in late, from Tellson's, and sat himself
down by Lucie and her husband in the dark window. It was a hot, wild
night, and they were all three reminded of the old Sunday night when
they had looked at the lightning from the same place.

"I began to think," said Mr. Lorry, pushing his brown wig back,
"that I should have to pass the night at Tellson's. We have been so
fun of business all day, that we have not known what to do first, or
which way to turn. There is such an uneasiness in Paris, that we
have actually a run of confidence upon us! Our customers over there,
seem not to be able to confide their property to us fast enough. There
is positively a mania among some of them for sending it to England."

"That has a bad look," said Darnay.

"A bad look, you say, my dear Darnay? Yes, but we don't know what
reason there is in it. People are so unreasonable! Some of us at
Tellson's are getting old, and we really can't be troubled out of
the ordinary course without due occasion."

"Stiff," said Darnay, "you know how gloomy and threatening the sky
is."

"I know that, to be sure," assented Mr. Lorry, trying to persuade
himself that his sweet temper was soured, and that he grumbled, "but I
am determined to be peevish after my long day's botheration. Where
is Manette?"

"Here he is," said the Doctor, entering the dark room at the moment.

"I am quite glad you are at home; for these hurries and
forebodings by which I have been surrounded all day long, have made me
nervous without reason. You are not going out, I hope?"

"No; I am going to play backgammon with you, if you like," said
the Doctor.

"I don't think I do like, if I may speak my mind. I am not fit to be
pitted against you to-night. Is the teaboard still there, Lucie? I
can't see."

"Of course, it has been kept for you."

"Thank ye, my dear. The precious child is safe in bed?"

"And sleeping soundly."

"That's right; all safe and well! I don't know why anything should
be otherwise than safe and well here, thank God; but I have been so
put out all day, and I am not as young as I was! My tea, my dear!
Thank ye. Now, come and take your place in the circle, and let us
sit quiet, and hear the echoes about which you have your theory."

"Not a theory; it was a fancy."

"A fancy, then, my wise pet," said Mr. Lorry, patting her hand.
"They are very numerous and very loud, though, are they not? Only hear
them!

Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their way into
anybody's life, footsteps not easily made clean again if once
stained red, the footsteps raging in Saint Antoine afar off, as the
little circle sat in the dark London window.

Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a vast dusky mass of
scarecrows heaving to and fro, with frequent gleams of light above the
billowy heads, where steel blades and bayonets shone in the sun. A
tremendous roar arose from the throat of Saint Antoine, and a forest
of naked arms struggled in the air like shrivelled branches of trees
in a winter wind: all the fingers convulsively clutching at every
weapon or semblance of a weapon that was thrown up from the depths
below, no matter how far off.

Who gave them out, whence they last came, where they began,
through what agency they crookedly quivered and jerked, scores at a
time, over the heads of the crowd, like a kind of lightning, no eye in
the throng could have told; but, muskets were being distributed- so
were cartridges, powder, and ball, bars of iron and wood, knives,
axes, pikes, every weapon that distracted ingenuity could discover
or devise. People who could lay hold of nothing else, set themselves
with bleeding hands to force stones and bricks out of their places
in walls. Every pulse and heart in Saint Antoine was on high-fever
strain and at high-fever heat. Every living creature there held life
as of no account, and was demented with a passionate readiness to
sacrifice it.

As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this
raging circled round Defarge's wine-shop, and every human drop in
the caldron had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex where
Defarge himself, already begrimed with gunpowder and sweat, issued
orders, issued arms, thrust this man back, dragged this man forward,
disarmed one to arm another, laboured and strove in the thickest of
the uproar.

"Keep near to me, Jacques Three," cried Defarge; "and do you,
Jacques One and Two, separate and put yourselves at the head of as
many of these patriots as you can. Where is my wife?"

"Eh, well! Here you see me!" said madame, composed as ever, but
not knitting to-day. Madame's resolute right hand was occupied with an
axe, in place of the usual softer implements, and in her girdle were a
pistol and a cruel knife.

"Where do you go, my wife?"

"I go," said madame, "with you at present. You shall see me at the
head of women, by-and-bye."

"Come, then!" cried Defarge, in a resounding voice. "Patriots and
friends, we are ready! The Bastille!"

With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been
shaped into the detested word, the living sea rose, wave on wave,
depth on depth, and overflowed the city to that point. Alarm-bells
ringing, drums beating, the sea raging and thundering on its new
beach, the attack begun.

Deep ditches, double drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great
towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. Through the fire and
through the smoke- in the fire and in the smoke, for the sea cast
him up against a cannon, and on the instant he became a cannonier-
Defarge of the wineshop worked like a manful soldier, Two fierce
hours.

Deep ditch, single drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great
towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. One drawbridge down! "Work,
comrades all, work! Work, Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques One
Thousand, Jacques Two Thousand, Jacques, Jacques Five-and-Twenty
Thousand; in the name of all the Angels or the Devils- which you
prefer- work!" Thus Defarge of the wine-shop, still at his gun,
which had long grown hot.

"To me, women!" cried madame his wife. "What! We can kill as well as
the men when the place is taken!" And to her, with a shrill thirsty
cry, trooping women variously armed, but all armed alike in hunger and
revenge.

Cannon, muskets, fire and smoke; but, still the deep ditch, the
single drawbridge, the massive stone walls, and the eight great
towers. Slight displacements of the raging sea, made by the falling
wounded. Flashing weapons, blazing torches, smoking waggonloads of wet
straw, hard work at neighbouring barricades in all directions,
shrieks, volleys, execrations, bravery without stint, boom smash and
rattle, and the furious sounding of the living sea; but, still the
deep ditch, and the single drawbridge, and the massive stone walls,
and the eight great towers, and still Defarge of the wine-shop at
his gun, grown doubly hot by the service of Four fierce hours.

A white flag from within the fortress, and a parley- this dimly
perceptible through the raging storm, nothing audible in it-
suddenly the sea rose immeasurably wider and higher, and swept Defarge
of the wine-shop over the lowered drawbridge, past the massive stone
outer walls, in among the eight great towers surrendered!

So resistless was the force of the ocean bearing him on, that even
to draw his breath or turn his head was as impracticable as if he
had been struggling in the surf at the South Sea, until he was
landed in the outer courtyard of the Bastille. There, against an angle
of a wall, he made a struggle to look about him. Jacques Three was
nearly at his side; Madame Defarge, still heading some of her women,
was visible in the inner distance, and her knife was in her hand.
Everywhere was tumult, exultation, deafening and maniacal
bewilderment, astounding noise, yet furious dumb-show.

"The Prisoners!"

"The Records!"

"The secret cells!"

"The instruments of torture!"

"The Prisoners!"

Of all these cries, and ten thousand incoherences, "The
Prisoners!" was the cry most taken up by the sea that rushed in, as if
there were an eternity of people, as well as of time and space. When
the foremost billows rolled past, bearing the prison officers with
them, and threatening them all with instant death if any secret nook
remained undisclosed, Defarge laid his strong hand on the breast of
one of these men- a man with a grey head, who had a lighted torch in
his hand- separated him from the rest, and got him between himself and
the wall.

"Show me the North Tower!" said Defarge. "Quick!"

"I will faithfully," replied the man, "if you will come with me. But
there is no one there."

"What is the meaning of One Hundred and Five, North Tower?" asked
Defarge. "Quick!"

"The meaning, monsieur?"

"Does it mean a captive, or a place of captivity? Or do you mean
that shall strike you dead?"

"Kill him!" croaked Jacques Three, who had come close up.

"Monsieur, it is a cell."

"Show it me!"

"Pass this way, then."

Jacques Three, with his usual craving on him, and evidently
disappointed by the dialogue taking a turn that did not seem to
promise bloodshed, held by Defarge's arm as he held by the
turnkey's. Their three heads had been close together during this brief
discourse, and it had been as much as they could do to hear one
another, even then: so tremendous was the noise of the living ocean,
in its irruption into the Fortress, and its inundation of the courts
and passages and staircases. All around outside, too, it beat the
walls with a deep, hoarse roar, from which, occasionally, some partial
shouts of tumult broke and leaped into the air like spray.

Through gloomy vaults where the light of day had never shone, past
hideous doors of dark dens and cages, down cavernous flights of steps,
and again up steep rugged ascents of stone and brick, more like dry
waterfalls than staircases, Defarge, the turnkey, and Jacques Three,
linked hand and arm, went with all the speed they could make. Here and
there, especially at first, the inundation started on them and swept
by; but when they had done descending, and were winding and climbing
up a tower, they were alone. Hemmed in here by the massive thickness
of walls and arches, the storm within the fortress and without was
only audible to them in a dull, subdued way, as if the noise out of
which they had come had almost destroyed their sense of hearing.

The turnkey stopped at a low door, put a key in a clashing lock,
swung the door slowly open, and said, as they all bent their heads and
passed in:

"One hundred and five, North Tower!"

There was a small, heavily-grated, unglazed window high in the wall,
with a stone screen before it, so that the sky could be only seen by
stooping low and looking up. There was a small chimney, heavily barred
across, a few feet within. There was a heap of old feathery wood-ashes
on the hearth. There was a stool, and table, and a straw bed. There
were the four blackened walls, and a rusted iron ring in one of them.

"Pass that torch slowly along these walls, that I may see them,"
said Defarge to the turnkey.

The man obeyed, and Defarge followed the light closely with his
eyes.

"Stop!- Look here, Jacques!"

"A. M.!" croaked Jacques Three, as he read greedily.

"Alexandre Manette," said Defarge in his ear, following the
letters with his swart forefinger, deeply engrained with gunpowder.
"And here he wrote 'a poor physician.' And it was he, without doubt,
who scratched a calendar on this stone. What is that in your hand? A
crowbar? Give it me!"

He had still the linstock of his gun in his own hand. He made a
sudden exchange of the two instruments, and turning on the
worm-eaten stool and table, beat them to pieces in a few blows.

"Hold the light higher!" he said, wrathfully, to the turnkey.
"Look among those fragments with care, Jacques. And see! Here is my
knife," throwing it to him; "rip open that bed, and search the
straw. Hold the light higher, you!"

With a menacing look at the turnkey he crawled upon the hearth, and,
peering up the chimney, struck and prised at its sides with the
crowbar, and worked at the iron grating across it. In a few minutes,
some mortar and dust came dropping down, which he averted his face
to avoid; and in it, and in the old wood-ashes, and in a crevice in
the chimney into which his weapon had slipped or wrought itself, he
groped with a cautious touch.

"Nothing in the wood, and nothing in the straw, Jacques?"

"Nothing."

Let us collect them together, in the middle of the cell. So! Light
them, you!

The turnkey fired the little pile, which blazed high and hot.
Stooping again to come out at the low-arched door, they left it
burning, and retraced their way to the courtyard; seeming to recover
their sense of hearing as they came down, until they were in the
raging flood once more.

They found it surging and tossing, in quest of Defarge himself.
Saint Antoine was clamorous to have its wine-shop keeper foremost in
the guard upon the governor who had defended the Bastille and shot the
people. Otherwise, the governor would not be marched to the Hotel de
Ville for judgment. Otherwise, the governor would escape, and the
people's blood (suddenly of some value, after many years of
worthlessness) be unavenged.

In the howling universe of passion and contention that seemed to
encompass this grim old officer conspicuous in his grey coat and red
decoration, there was but one quite steady figure, and that was a
woman's. "See, there is my husband!" she cried, pointing him out. "See
Defarge!" She stood immovable close to the grim old officer, and
remained immovable close to him; remained immovable close to him
through the streets, as Defarge and the rest bore him along;
remained immovable close to him when he was got near his
destination, and began to be struck at from behind; remained immovable
close to him when the long-gathering rain of stabs and blows fell
heavy; was so close to him when he dropped dead under it, that,
suddenly animated, she put her foot upon his neck, and with her
cruel knife-long ready-hewed off his head.

The hour was come, when Saint Antoine was to execute his horrible
idea of hoisting up men for lamps to show what he could be and do.
Saint Antoine's blood was up, and the blood of tyranny and
domination by the iron hand was down- down on the steps of the Hotel
de Ville where the governor's body lay- down on the sole of the shoe
of Madame Defarge where she had trodden on the body to steady it for
mutilation. "Lower the lamp yonder!" cried Saint Antoine, after
glaring round for a new means of death; "here is one of his soldiers
to be left on guard!" The swinging sentinel was posted, and the sea
rushed on.

The sea of black and threatening waters, and of destructive
upheaving of wave against wave, whose depths were yet unfathomed and
whose forces were yet unknown. The remorseless sea of turbulently
swaying shapes, voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the
furnaces of suffering until the touch of pity could make no mark on
them.

But, in the ocean of faces where every fierce and furious expression
was in vivid life, there were two groups of faces- each seven in
number- so fixedly contrasting with the rest, that never did sea
roll which bore more memorable wrecks with it. Seven faces of
prisoners, suddenly released by the storm that had burst their tomb,
were carried high overhead: all scared, all lost, all wondering and
amazed, as if the Last Day were come, and those who rejoiced around
them were lost spirits. Other seven faces there were, carried
higher, seven dead faces, whose drooping eyelids and half-seen eyes
awaited the Last Day. Impassive faces, yet with a suspended- not an
abolished- expression on them; faces, rather, in a fearful pause, as
having yet to raise the dropped lids of the eyes, and bear witness
with the bloodless lips, "THOU DIDST IT!"

Seven prisoners released, seven gory heads on pikes, the keys of the
accursed fortress of the eight strong towers, some discovered
letters and other memorials of prisoners of old time, long dead of
broken hearts, such, and such-like, the loudly echoing footsteps of
Saint Antoine escort through the Paris streets in mid-July, one
thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine. Now, Heaven defeat the fancy
of Lucie Darnay, and keep these feet far out of her life! For, they
are headlong, mad, and dangerous; and in the years so long after the
breaking of the cask at Defarge's wine-shop door, they are not
easily purified when once stained red.